This disclosure relates to determining demographics of a program audience.
Advertisers often set exposure goals for advertising campaigns for advertising content, e.g., television ads, and devise strategies to achieve these goals, e.g., when to air the advertising campaign content. Accordingly, advertisers are very interested in knowing the number of viewers in program audiences and the demographics of program audiences, e.g., the percentage of male and female viewers for a given program, and the ages of the male and female viewers.
The number of viewers of a television program can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, viewing device logs, such as set top box logs that include channel tune records, can be analyzed to determine the number of set top box devices tuned to particular television programs at particular times. Behavioral algorithms can also be applied to discount view counts that are likely false, e.g., view counts that occur late at night and multiple hours after a last channel tune are discounted as it is likely that a viewer has fallen asleep. Panels or surveys can also be used to determine the number of viewers.
Demographic information is typically gathered using panels or surveys. However, it is impractical to sample enough people to determine the audience composition for every particular television program. Accordingly, while ratings information in terms of the number of viewers may be available for many television programs, the programs are nevertheless unrated with respect to demographics.